The Rumors of St. Petersburg

Day two of St. Petersburg was just as jammed pack as day one. We started with the Hermitage!

The Hermitage was formerly the winter palace of the imperial family (aka Anastasia) but it is now a museum that competes with the Louvre on how many pieces of art each has. They said that is you were to see every piece of art in the Hermitage for one minute, from opening to closing you would need 11 years! I doubt I could give every piece a minute but that's pretty insane.

I loved it!

After the museum, we saw a few more cathedrals.

Including the cathedral that has the tombs of all the imperial families including Anastasia's (pictured above.) I still LOVE the cartoon "Anastasia" and all the songs were stuck in my head the entire time we were there. However, the film is far far from what actually happened. I guess it was Anastasia's sister and brother who were missing and so they just found their remains and will bury them with the family as well. It's just an interesting mystery.

That afternoon, we went on nice boat ride around the city.

When we got off the boat we had a real Russian lunch with a bunch of other tour groups. A man in our group was very happy to find out that all six of us don't drink so that he could get our beers that came with the meal. Good thing he wasn't our driver!

After lunch, we went to the Tsar's cousin's palace. That's right- even the long, lost cousin got a sweet palace. The size of it was nothing compared to the Imperial Family's palaces, but it did have a theatre room. (compliments of google image)

It was a beautiful palace, but so are they all. This one also had some crazy history to go with it. There was a certain 'medicine man' that's influence over the Tsarista had the family worried so this cousin invited the medicine man over to his palace's basement for lunch that had been poisoned. But the poisoned lunch did not kill Rasputin so the cousin shot him. He went to get guards to help and when they got back, Rasputin was not there! He was running away so they gunned him down again and wrapped him in a rug and threw his body into the freezing river.

When they found his body and gave him an autopsy, there was water in his lungs! He died from drowning! Not the poison or the gun shots, but drowning. Seriously creepy stuff. Because of all this history, they have a diorama set up in the basement to tell the history. And we got to see it all!

It was completely surreal to actually be in Russia and see how unbelievable and different it is. But it was a beautiful two days and I loved my babushka scarf that husband bought for me using all that Russian speaking of his!